Post #3511942
2026-06-30 21:12 UTC
@jrootham@mastodon.acm.org @PavelASamsonov@mastodon.social So it depends on how much you have and it's really non-intuitive how long it will linger. So all of your really short stuff like I131 will go away quickly, but even something with a relatively short half-life like Cs137 could be dangerous for centuries if you have enough of it.
Now couple this with history is a lot shorter than most people think: 10 half lives of cesium-137 ago and the US hasn't been founded yet
Replies (1)
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@Canageek@wandering.shop 2026-06-30 21:14
@jrootham@mastodon.acm.org @PavelASamsonov@mastodon.social So you have stuff that is spicy enough to cause a lot of problems, they could very easily still be heinously dangerous 100 years after a societal collapse. Plus in previous technological regressions, it's been very uneven. You actually had a lot of metal working and agricultural advances during the collapse of the Roman Empire, but large-scale understanding of construction techniques was lost.